Referential integrity across reboots

[Randy Presuhn <rpresuhn@dorothy.bmc.com>]

Hi -

A problem has popped up in a couple of working groups needing
to handle persistant configuration data.

An example of the basic problem is that VACM is based on the
assumption that the name of an object instance to which access
is to be controlled will remain the same across reboots.
For objects whose names change, like table entries indexed
with ifIndex, fine-grained access control becomes problematic.

However, it's not just a problem with VACM.  It shows up
anywhere where we can have things like row or instance pointers
as configuration data that needs to survive a reboot, and
those pointers can reference objects whose names might change.
So, for example, the event mib, the alarm mib, the arc mib,
the expression mib, the notification filtering in RFC 2573,
rmon's thresholding, and nmpconf pm mib scripts are just a
few examples of things that could run afoul of this.

Thoughts?

 ------------------------------------------------------
 Randy Presuhn          BMC Software, Inc.  1-3141
 randy_presuhn@bmc.com  2141 North First Street
 Tel: +1 408 546-1006   San Jose, California 95131  USA
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 My opinions and BMC's are independent variables.
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